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One time, I had a friend over to play a bit of Red Alert on my LAN. During the game he said he needed to go to the bathroom, so we paused it. After about 10 minutes of wondering where the hell he went, I get up and go to check on him.

I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.

well, no. it's just really hard to make intelligent agents.

Goddammit now I am responding, but yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

But I mean, when we were vaguely alluding to all this, the timeframe we were talking about was a century. I'm not saying that's enough, or nearly enough, I have no real idea - all I was trying to imply was that it's incredibly hard to tell with these things.

Similarly but separately, I also just don't like the occasional gross misunderstanding that machine intelligence needs be a "less sophisticated" form of intelligence than ours, incapable of art. But yeah, it's a pretty terrible discussion to have either way.

Video games.

it doesn't need to be a less sophisticated form of intelligence, it is a less sophisticated form of intelligence. and unless you're ray kurtzweil you understand that there are practical limits to technology and 'true ai' is something of a pipe dream. it's not productive to assume that we'll develop AI unless you're writing science fiction, and the discussion as a whole is essentially meaningless for that reason.

I didn't say offended. It just seems a little naïve unless you base your definition of art around precluding the possibility - but seriously, I fucking hate this whole argument, so I'm not expecting a response, and that's the last I'll say on it myself.

well, no. it's just really hard to make intelligent agents.

Goddammit now I am responding, but yes, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

But I mean, when we were vaguely alluding to all this, the timeframe we were talking about was a century. I'm not saying that's enough, or nearly enough, I have no real idea - all I was trying to imply was that it's incredibly hard to tell with these things.

Similarly but separately, I also just don't like the occasional gross misunderstanding that machine intelligence needs be a "less sophisticated" form of intelligence than ours, incapable of art. But yeah, it's a pretty terrible discussion to have either way.

Video games.

it doesn't need to be a less sophisticated form of intelligence, it is a less sophisticated form of intelligence. and unless you're ray kurtzweil you understand that there are practical limits to technology and 'true ai' is something of a pipe dream. it's not productive to assume that we'll develop AI unless you're writing science fiction, and the discussion as a whole is essentially meaningless for that reason.

I'll absolutely agree that it's completely irrelevant to the topic of this thread, so I am sorry for going down that road. I do think it's pretty bizarre to believe there's any physical construct that can't one day be artificially created. Regardless, I'm going to duck out of the argument rather than contend the rest of the paragraph (and derail the thread further), except to say that I strongly disagree.

I will say that I felt more emotional attachment to several of STALKER's 30-40 line NPCs than I did to entire characters in some other games I've played. I think it was because the world felt so immersive that the characters automatically felt far more real themselves, even if they only had a few things to say to me. And it also probably helped that nearly everything in that world wanted to kill me, except for several dozen Stalkers scattered about the world.

Sitting around a campfire as the void beyond the light howls with terrible, radiated beasts. Then a stalker pulls out a guitar and everything gets better. The next day your get crushed by an anomaly. Praise be the Zone.

a roguelike game in 3d would be cool, wonder why it doesn't happen too much. probably a ton of work. I remember Nosferatu did something like that, but there would be a problem that the key necessary to open door X was on the other side of door X leaving the game unbeatable.

I think a lot of it is that with tile graphics you let the player imagine most of the stuff that is going on. Modeling every single thing in a randomly generated dungeon and making all the monsters move and interact nicely with all the other models would take a huge amount of time and money. Time and money they could use to make more content in other areas that people play roguelikes for

A dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons wouldn't be tremendously difficult in the sense that you could create rooms as static meshes with "connector" points that make sure that doors line up or whatever. Then you could randomly spawn items and weapons and monsters in different rooms and have people explore.

You couldn't guarantee any sort of natural progression of gameplay or difficulty (unless you scaled the spawning of things to how much of the dungeon you explored - but still, certain set pieces might show up at weird times), but it could have the potential to be sort of like a 3D game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

oh you could definitely make assets for the rooms or whatever

I'm just saying that modeling and animating every single monster and making all of your actions (and there are oodles of actions you can perform in roguelikes) be animated would be a heck of a lot of work for not that much gain

e: but I am in love with the idea of randomly generated levels and I think that levels that don't have a clear progression from easy to hard are very interesting and not very "gamey"

Oh guys do you remember a series of games in the late 90s called commado or something it was set in ww2 and you had a team of around five and you had to accomplish specific objectives like bomb a dam or something.

I was terrible at it but I really want to load it up onto my netbook and play it.